How Does Writing Affect Menatl Health journal article
Writing can affect mental health by reducing anxiety, stress and depression. It can also help people to improve their focus and get more done. In addition, it can increase self-esteem and boost confidence.
A recent study has shown that writing about your emotions can help to decrease the intensity of difficult feelings. It also helps to free your mind and let you focus on one thing at a time.
Writers who did not downplay their feelings while writing tended to have better physical and mental health indexes than those who wrote on neutral topics (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The researchers found that writing on emotional topics teaches people to be in the moment, acknowledge their emotions and express them.
Various linguistic studies have shown that expressive writing participants use more negative-emotion words and more ‘cognitive mechanism’ words than controls, which may reflect changes in cognitive processing of the experience. They are also more likely to describe their emotional experience using specific ’emotional schemas’ about themselves and the world, such as a feeling of being in a place of safety or being able to trust others.
These results suggest that writing may operate through disinhibition. This is a theory that suggests that writing about a traumatic event could reduce the physiological stress of inhibition on the body, by helping to release emotional tension (Greenberg & Beall, 1986; Sloan & Marx, 2004b ).
However, some studies have shown that the health benefits from expressive writing are not due to disinhibition alone. For example, participants writing about an imaginary trauma that they had not experienced showed no difference in health outcomes compared with those writing about an actual traumatic event (Greenberg et al, 1996).
The benefits of expressive writing have been reported in a number of objectively assessed health outcomes including illness-related visits to the doctor, blood pressure and lung function (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker et al, 1988; King & Miner, 2000), grade point average (Pennebaker & Francis, 1996), absenteeism from work (Francis & Pennebaker, 1992) and re-employment after job loss (Spera et al, 1994).
Some studies have also shown that writing improves immune functioning. For example, one study found that writing about a traumatic experience increased participants’ immunity to the virus hepatitis B.
